Uncanny Tales

by Robert Sheckley

  “The notion has a certain charm,” Silviu admitted. “But scientifically, it is complete nonsense.”

  Florin smiled and shook his head. “It is only a supposition, of course. But might we take it as correct, just for the sake of argument?”

  “I suppose you can take anything as correct,” Silviu said somewhat grumpily, but raised no further objection.

  “Excellent. And would you object if we add the concept that, though physical beings, we live in the midst of an invisible spiritual world?”

  “I object to the term ‘spiritual’,” Silviu said.

  “I only mean that all our influences are not apparent to our unaided senses. I cite the unease most people get just before an earthquake. This cannot be measured by science yet, or even truly ascertained. But it undoubtedly has a physical basis. In the sense I’m using the word, atoms are spiritual. We know of their existence only through rather sophisticated inference.”

  “Put that way, I suppose I can accept your supposition,” Silviu said.

  “My point is that things exist which, though impalpable, unsusceptible to the testimony of our senses, are nevertheless capable of exerting an influence over us.”

  “What you’re stating is mere common sense,” Silviu said.

  “Yes. Thank you. So we have a world of influences which we do not know about directly. This I call spiritual. From this, we can conjecture that what happens in a man’s life at any given time will depend to a great extent on the momentary and ever-changing nature of the spiritual world he passes through, an invisible world through which he swims like a fish in water.”

  Silviu pursed his lips and looked grave, but could find no objection to the statement.

  Florin went on. “It is this world that gives our physical world its nature and tone. What happens here in our world of everyday reality is influenced to a great extent by what is happening there in that world of unseen spiritual entities. An atom, I maintain, is one such entity. A ghost or an evil influence could be another.”

  Helene spoke up for the first time. “Is it so certain that anything is happening there? Mightn’t this spiritual world, if it exists at all, be all of a piece, like an ocean or a fog bank?”

  Florin smiled and shrugged. “It could be any way we please to imagine it. But in my view, the spiritual world is larger and more various than our world, and more mysterious. We have discovered atoms in it, or rather, inferred their existence, but there is no reason to think we have come to the end of what is there to discover.”

  Silviu nodded. He was uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, but he wasn’t going to argue that all discoveries had been made.

  “In my view,” Florin said, “this spiritual realm is a complete world in its own right, a realm with a psychic climate that has its equivalents of storms and sunny days, and much else besides. If you’ll grant me this, perhaps you’ll also grant that this realm can produce freak weather conditions from time to time.”

  “A novel notion,” Silviu said, “but it seems to follow from your premise.”

  “Therefore it follows that what we don’t see, but is there nonetheless, influences us though we aren’t aware of it. Now we come to the shapes of things and their influence on our lives.”

  “About time we got to the spooky stuff,” Giulio said, pouring himself another plum brandy.

  “A certain landscape, thrown up perhaps by chance elements, could provide a nexus, a focus, for certain spiritual beings—creatures that probably have an objective existence in their own realm, but are as ghosts or spirits in ours. The configuration of a countryside, the shape of a castle, and the momentary spiritual climate that forms up around them might have been instrumental in bringing forth a Vlad the Impaler, or, at another time, an Elizabeth Bathory.”

  “If that were the case,” Silviu said, “why aren’t we drowned in the horrors of the invisible world like the Dark Ages thought we were?”

  “I think the Dark Ages exaggerated the situation. In my formulation, these eruptions of the so-called supernatural are both exceptional and transitory.

  “They are elements thrown up for a brief time by the chance combination of landscape and spiritual entity. They persevere for a few days or years, then dissolve again into the matter-of-factness of our daily lives. In one place the influences produce a Vlad the Impaler. A dozen miles away, in another spiritual microclimate, there might be nothing exceptional. A few miles further on, in yet another spiritual microclimate, we might find a spate of evil sprites in the form of bats, living only for a day, perhaps, but doing damage to whoever was so unfortunate as to encounter them.”

  “It’s a lovely idea,” Giulio said. I noticed he was a little drunk. “If we could figure this stuff out, we could run guided tours of haunted places. ‘Come to Vlad’s castle and meet Dracula! Appearing for three days only due to favorable weather conditions.’ It could be a scheduled event, like our recent eclipse!”

  “I don’t think it’s a funny idea at all,” Gina said. “My grandmother was from Salerno and she had similar notions. I was always afraid of that old woman.”

  “Your mother must have inherited it from her,” Giulio said. “I wonder what chance combination of landscape and evil spirits combined to bring her about.”

  “Don’t you dare say anything against my mother!” Gina said, laughing and throwing a cushion at him.

  The talk broke up at that point by mutual consent. Silviu had had enough of the argument. He seemed to feel that science had been turned into superstition, though he couldn’t quite figure out how it had come about. But he was tired and perhaps not thinking too well. We all were tired. Our host, noticing the slackening of our interest, showed us to our rooms.

  Helene and I went up to the little room that had been assigned to us, and while unpacking we fell into one of those senseless quarrels that seem to arise for no reason, and to continue despite the best efforts of both parties to bring them to an end. At last we fell into an uneasy silence. Helene was sitting in front of the little dresser brushing her hair, looking back at me in the mirror, when she said, “You know, Charles, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Rub the side of your mouth in that way. You’ve only just begun it, and I’m sure it’s meant to tease, but I find it quite sinister.”

  “I wasn’t aware that I was doing anything.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then turned back to the mirror, continuing to brush her hair with long, even strokes.

  My mood, which had been equable all evening despite our situation, took a downward turn. I hung up my clothes and paced aimlessly around the room for a while. I was wondering what had possessed me to undertake this trip in the first place. What had seemed a light-hearted lark only a day ago now felt like the stupidest thing in the world, and a source of deep irritation. I wondered why I had ever agreed to travel with Giulio and Gina, newlyweds who couldn’t stop touching each other, and Silviu, precise, didactic, humorless. Even Helene, normally the pleasantest of companions, tonight was acting irritable and unapproachable.

  Now, just to make matters worse, she spoke up again. “Charles, I’ve asked you this before, please don’t creep up on me like that.”

  I choked back a harsh reply, turned on my heel and walked through the little gallery down to the adjoining bathroom.

  Despite it being almost midnight, I decided to shave, and thus steal a march on the next day. It was an old-fashioned bathroom, with a basin with two taps, a bathtub on clawed feet, and a shower attachment running from the faucet with a valve to direct the flow. The room itself was of plain pine, with a layer of white paint that covered it none too well. At the base of the tub, almost at the adjoining wall, the final wooden board had been cut too short, and there was a kind of gap in the wall, an opening less than a foot square. Reaching in and fumbling around, I find a kind of a space, too small to hold anything of much importance, but designed, so it seemed to me, to hold something. I found myself staring at it, and
then I straightened and looked at my straight razor, which I had removed from its small leather case. I was turning the razor so that the light of the hanging kerosene lamp played across its edge, and all the time I was thinking to myself, “I know a trick worth two of that,” though I had no idea where I had heard it or what I meant by it.

  I looked out the small window. The darkness was almost complete, but the dirty white mist floated on it in long streamers, as though it was reaching out and trying to grasp something. I watched for a while, then sighed and returned to my shaving.

  When I was done, I put my razor back in its case and returned to our room.

  Helene had finished brushing her hair and was now removing her makeup with cold cream.

  She looked pale and not very attractive, her face elongated and twisted in the somewhat distorted mirror. I found myself looking at her and thinking, “Someone with a face like this could kill a man in his sleep and think nothing of it. But I know a trick worth two of that.” It seemed to me the punch line of some story, but to save my life I couldn’t remember where it came from. But perhaps it would come to me later.

  I had a dream that night. In it, a horrid presentiment gripped me, and I ran down the hall to Giulio’s and Gina’s room. They were both dead. Someone had severed their heads. Or perhaps they had done it themselves. But how, in that case, had the heads changed position, his lying near her body and hers paired with his? In my dream I put the question to Giulio, and his head smiled at me and said, “Listen, it’s not what you think.”

  “Perhaps not,” I replied, “but in any event I know a trick worth two of that.”

  By mid-morning the next day we were on our way again. The sky had cleared and the rain had stopped. The sun was up and it promised to be another hot day.

  We came down to the main road without difficulty. When we reached the blockage that had stopped us last night, we found that a team of peasants were clearing the landslide, and a policeman was directing traffic around the remaining debris. We were on our way to Budapest, and Italy after that.

  Our moods had lifted considerably. We didn’t even talk about last night.

  Except for Silviu, who said, “That innkeeper, Florin, was a strange fellow with his far-fetched theories. But harmless, I think. Probably just trying to keep us amused.”

  I nodded, but I was thinking along quite different lines. Florin the innkeeper with his talk of Vaihinger and Chesterton and his theory of the ever-changing invisible world of spirits—what fools he must have taken us for! How he must have enjoyed the malice of his suggestions! I could see him now, chuckling in his warm sitting room, drinking plum brandy, warming to its glow as he thought about how his vile insinuations would fester in us, releasing their poisons, spreading their insidious rot, like spores growing and festering in the dark places of our minds, until, months or years later, when we had forgotten their source, they would bear fruit and burst, and one day I would senselessly strangle Helene in her sleep, or, if the poison worked in her first, she would poison me during an apparently eventless evening over dinner, between the soup and the appetizer.

  Helene was not going to get me, however. Back in our villa on the Lido, before the spiritual poison had a chance to make her dangerous, action could be taken that would make her death seem natural.

  As for Silviu, Giulio, and Gina, they would have to take their chances. I would make it a point never to see them again. Just to be on the safe side.

  But as for Florin, the innkeeper—the source of the contagion—I had my own plans for him.

  Oh yes, my friend, I thought. Enjoy yourself in your snug sitting room, chuckling over the catastrophes that will befall those who come your way.

  But soon I’ll return—to retrieve my shaving case, and my straight razor, which I so carefully hid in the little space between the bath tub and the wall—and then I’ll show you I know a trick worth two of that.

  Mind-Slaves of Manitori

  One of my favorites. I’ve long felt it should be made into a movie.

  Rights are available!

  1.

  I was almost past the plane of the asteroids when I picked up a signal at the edge of my radar reception. The flash pattern showed it was an inhabited planetoid, although it wasn’t listed in the Properties List in the back of my Asteroid Pilot. It set me to thinking. I could get to it in a few hours by an insignificant change of direction. A day or two lost in my months- long run to Io wouldn’t matter much.

  Travelers were always welcomed in the few inhabited asteroid worlds. I punched in the new course. I figured that had to be a private world, not one of the ones that the Great Powers maintained for the sake of their prestige.

  Into this setup, especially when you figured in the cost of Earth-normal gravity and lighting. A rich man’s plaything, I thought. A little out of my league.

  Still, what the hell. I radioed for permission to land. It was granted at once.

  It all seemed simple enough. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

  2.

  By the way, I’m Ned Fletcher. I’m a spaceship driver for Southern Extractions, a company with mining interests all around the solar system.

  It’s a pretty good job, even if it is sort of low-class work, like driving a truck, only less interesting, and without much in the way of truck stops where you can get a cup of coffee and a little conversation. Not that I’m complaining. There’s a depression on, I know I’m lucky to have any work at all.

  Back when I was a kid in East Orange, New Jersey, and watching television specials on the wonders of spaceflight, I always thought that when I grew up I’d live in a world where great spaceliners moved majestically through space on their way to strange worlds where exotic races lived. But the early explorers never ran into any other races. Men soon found that living on Mars or Luna wasn’t as interesting as people thought it would be. All the real action was on Earth. So by the time I grew up, only embassies and eccentrics lived in space, and a few men like myself who drove the ore boats.

  My father had been a small town lawyer, and an honest one, and therefore poor. All he could hand me was a legacy of friends in high places in southern New Jersey politics.

  One of those friends pulled some strings and got me into the Spaceship Drivers’ Union.

  We spend weeks and months alone, piloting our ships to the mines and depots on the Moon and in the asteroids. We collect the ores from the automatic mining machines and load them by machinery, without even a helper. There had been talk of having the ships carry more than one man, and this had been tried, but with poor results. Two-man teams were apt to get into violent quarrels; three-man teams usually ended up with two against one. Husband and wife spaceship teams were suggested, but the union voted this down vehemently. They needed to take care of their members, not throw the field open to their wives and girlfriends.

  Anyhow, that might have led to the ridiculous situation of babies in space—for where would the mothers leave their children? The idea was optimistic, maybe even visionary, but it was not to be tried at this time, with unemployment at 25 percent of the male adult work force.

  The first commercial space drive was developed by Daimler in Brandenburg in 1922. Dollfus was chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian empire at that time, and John Anthony Grimes was President of the United States.

  Times were bad in the thirteen colonial States of America, surrounded as we were by inimical powers. There was Spanish Florida and French Louisiana to the south. Mexico stretched from the borders of the Texas Republic clear around to San Francisco. Above that was the Russian state of Siberia-Alaska, and the British Canada and French Canada. The Colonial States of America was a small country.

  A lot of us felt that the breaks had gone against us. Who could have thought that Pershing’s expedition into Mexico would bring down the prolonged horrors of the Mexican & Indian Wars, and this at a time when we had our hands full with the French, who were threatening to expand out of Louisiana into Indian Territory? We also
had to contend with separatist American States like the Mormon Theocratic Republic of Moroni. And there were frequent border incidents with Comancheria, Apacheria, or one of the other Indian nations on our continent. There were too many countries occupying North America, and we quarreled with each other a lot of the time. Some people felt we should have united right at the beginning and saved ourselves a lot of trouble. But it’s hard to imagine that as a possibility, given the strength of the Indians and Mexicans and the tenacity of the Europeans.

  Our last hope died with George Washington at Valley Forge. It was too bad we lost that one. A few years later the British granted us our independence. But the final treaty imposed heavy territorial restriction to keep us from expanding beyond our original borders.

  Other countries had already staked their claims in the North American wilderness, and the Colonial American government wasn’t strong enough to throw them out. Not only was history against us, but economics, too.

  In 1914, when the threat of war in Europe was miraculously averted by the assassination of Crown Prince Rudolph at Sarajevo, the world embarked on a spending spree that ended in 1929 when everyone went broke. A world-wide depression began then and it’s still going on.

  At first we had thought that space flight and extraterrestrial commerce would change the world situation and bring prosperity to us Americans.

  We set up our mining operations on the moon and in the asteroid belt. The low cost of space travel made these operations workable for us even without much European or Oriental capital investment. Profits from the extraterrestrial mining operations gave our country some additional income, but it didn’t change our general situation of subservience to the Europeans, and it didn’t stop us from doing their farming and mining for them.